Wittgenstein's Vienna

Author: Allan Janik
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
ISBN: 9781566631327
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de si cle gaiety and corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, and Arnold Schoenberg, he forged his ideas in a classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. "Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have acted on a striking premise: an understanding of prewar Vienna, Wittgenstein's native city, will make it easier to comprehend both his work and our own problems....This is an independent work containing much that is challenging, new, and useful."--New York Times Book Review.

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Author: Allan Janik
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351326147
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Book Description
Fin de siecle Vienna was once memorably described by Karl Kraus as a "proving ground for the destruction of the world." In the decades leading to the World War that brought down the Austro-Hungarian empire, the city was at once an operetta dream world masking social and political problems and tension, as well as a center for the far-reaching explorations and innovations in music, art, science, and philosophy that would help to define modernity. One of the most powerful critiques of the retreat into fantasy was that of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early career in Vienna has helped frame debates about ethical and aesthetic values in culture. In Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited Allan Janik expands upon his work Wittgenstein's Vienna (co-authored with Stephen Toulmin) to amplify a number of significant points concerning the genesis of Wittgenstein's thought, the nature of Viennese culture, and criticism of contemporary culture. Although Wittgenstein is the central figure in this volume, Janik places considerable emphasis on other influential figures, both Viennese and non-Viennese, in order to break down some of the persistent stereotypes about the philosopher and his surrounding culture, especially the myths of "carefree" Vienna and Wittgenstein the positivist. The persistence of these myths, in Janik's view, stems in part from the inability of many historians to differentiate past from present in the evaluation of intellectual currents. Janik reviews a number of figures overlooked in assessing Wittgenstein: Otto Weininger, Kraus, Schoenberg, Nietzsche, Wagner, Ibsen, Offenbach, and Georg Trakl. All of these, Janik demonstrates, are absolutely necessary to understand what was at stake in the debates on aestheticism and the critique of a modern culture. Wittgenstein's efforts to recognize the limits of thought and language and thus to be fair to science, religion, and art account for his place of honor among critical modernists. These essays elucidate Wittgenstein's perspective on our culture.

The Voices of Wittgenstein

Author: Friedrich Waismann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134934688
Category : Philosophy
Languages : de
Pages : 606

Book Description
This brings for the first time over one hundred short essays in philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind. It is an invaluable introduction to Wittgenstein's 'later philosophy'.

Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle

Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
ISBN: 9780631134695
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
This collection contains hitherto unknown letters exchanged between Wittgenstein and the most important of his Cambridge friends and includes editorial notes based on archival material not previously explored. Incorporates many previously undiscovered unique and significant letters. A powerful record and intimate insight into Wittgenstein's life and thought. Extensive editorial annotations.

Exact Thinking in Demented Times

Author: Karl Sigmund
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096964
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 491

Book Description
A dazzling group biography of the early twentieth-century thinkers who transformed the way the world thought about math and science Inspired by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert's pursuit of the fundamental rules of mathematics, some of the most brilliant minds of the generation came together in post-World War I Vienna to present the latest theories in mathematics, science, and philosophy and to build a strong foundation for scientific investigation. Composed of such luminaries as Kurt Gö and Rudolf Carnap, and stimulated by the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle left an indelible mark on science. Exact Thinking in Demented Times tells the often outrageous, sometimes tragic, and never boring stories of the men who transformed scientific thought. A revealing work of history, this landmark book pays tribute to those who dared to reinvent knowledge from the ground up.

Wittgenstein's Nephew

Author: Thomas Bernhard
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400077567
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their once-casual friendship quickens, these two eccentric men begin to discover in each other a possible antidote to their feelings of hopelessness and mortality—a spiritual symmetry forged by their shared passion for music, strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and great fear in the face of death. Part memoir, part fiction, Wittgenstein’s Nephew is both a meditation on the artist’s struggle to maintain a solid foothold in a world gone incomprehensibly askew, and a stunning—if not haunting—eulogy to a real-life friendship.

Edge of Irony

Author: Marjorie Perloff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022605442X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
"An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as "Avant-Garde in a Different Key: Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind," Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 311-38."

The Murder of Professor Schlick

Author: David Edmonds
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691211965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
"On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. Weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of rising extremism in Hitler's Europe, David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle--associated with billiant thinkers like Otto Neurath, Kurt Gödel, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Popper--and of a philosophical movement movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by and unreason."--

The Wittgenstein House

Author: Bernhard Leitner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Related to author's Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1973.

Wittgenstein's House

Author: Nana Last
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823228800
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
"The book advances the radical proposition that the field in which architecture and philosophy operate includes linguistic and spatial practices. It develops innovative forms of interdisciplinary analyses to demonstrate that the philosophical positions put forth by Wittgenstein's two main works are literally unthinkable outside of their respective conceptions of space: the view from above in the early work and the view from within constructed by the later work."--BOOK JACKET.